Qualcomm Announces Virtual Reality SDK for Snapdragon 820 Chipset

Virtual Reality is undoubtedly the next big thing. With many big players like Samsung, HTC, Sony, etc. all trying to capitalise on this market, big chipset giants like Qualcomm also felt the need to fuel this already red-hot market. Qualcomm Technologies Inc., has just announced a new virtual reality (VR) software development kit (SDK). This will make it much easier for developers to design VR apps than run on Snapdragon chipsets.

VR is far more immersive and provides the users with a more enriching experience than the current hardware and the latest Snapdragon 820 chip can be used in different VR hardware for running a variety of virtual reality apps and games.

The Virtual Reality (VR) Software Development Kit (SDK) will allow the developers to access advanced VR features. This will help them in achieving more improved VR performance and at the same time providing high power efficiency in the devices using the latest Qualcomm Snapdragon 820 chipset. This kit will be made available to the developers for free through the Qualcomm Developer Network during the second quarter of 2016.

This SDK will help the developers in efficiently distributing processing workload between the multiple cores. This is very important as the cores need to keep up with the rendering tasks and motion sensors.

The Snapdragon VR SDK will have many features like the digital signal processing (DSP) sensor fusion which allows it to combine the data attained from the accelerometers and gyroscopes through the Snapdragon Sensor Core. This leads to much faster transfer of rendered 3D images, stereoscopic rendering with lens correction and the laying out of menus and the UI in the VR world. It is also very power efficient.

“We’re providing advanced tools and technologies to help developers significantly improve the visual user experience of next-generation virtual reality applications like games, 360 degree VR videos, and a variety of interactive education and entertainment applications,” said Dave Durnil, senior director of engineering at Qualcomm, in a statement. “VR will be a new paradigm for how we interact with the world, and we’re excited to help mobile VR developers more efficiently deliver compelling and high-quality experiences on upcoming Snapdragon 820 VR-capable Android smartphones and headsets.”

VR is a growing business and it is expected to be a $120 billion business by 2020, according to tech advisor Digi-Capital. This means this market is going to see a lot of competition and thus we can expect a more and more efficient and graphically impressive VR devices coming in the future. Qualcomm would also won’t want to be left behind and keeping in this line, it is going to showcase its demos at the Game Developers Conference this week on a Samsung device.

This is all for now, stay tuned for more news and info and do leave your comments below.